


Hope

by papofglencoe



Category: Hunger Games Series - All Media Types, Hunger Games Trilogy - Suzanne Collins, The Hunger Games (Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, F/M, Infertility
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-21
Updated: 2016-07-21
Packaged: 2018-07-25 18:13:32
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,395
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7542877
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/papofglencoe/pseuds/papofglencoe
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It took five, ten, fifteen years… It would have been easier to let go.</p><p>But Peeta wanted them so badly.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Hope

**Author's Note:**

> Originally written for D12 Drabbles (on tumblr). Unbetaed.

It took five, ten, fifteen years… It would have been easier to let go.

But Peeta wanted them so badly.

What’s not to love about how it started? With a bottle of wine on a chilly winter’s night, curled up together beneath a goose down comforter, fingers twined together, the light of the fire dancing off his pale skin, his blue eyes sparkling playfully, a stupid, drunken grin taking over every inch of his face when I told him we could try.

He grasped my neck, pulling me to him, crushing our lips together in a kiss that tasted like passion and joy and gratitude, but most of all, hope. We slipped our pajamas off with trembling fingers, even though we’d done this a thousand times before, because we’d made love, but we’d never made a baby. It made our love monumental, the choice we’d made.

When he pushed into me, when his hips rocked and his arms quaked and our sweaty bodies slid and bucked and collided, it was different than it had ever been before. So much better than I knew it could be. When he came, the warmth filling me, overcoming me, reducing me to senseless rubble, we laughed and cried, eyes spilling over with tears as we thought about the life we may have made with our love. What she would look like, if she’d have my hair and his eyes or his hair and my eyes. If she’d look like someone we had known our entire lives, every line of her face already memorized at first sight, or if she would be born a perfect stranger, inexplicably dropped from the heavens, a complete surprise.

Peeta kissed the bare skin of my stomach, stretched taut over sharp hip bones, and we fell asleep naked on the floor, sticky and sated and lost in the promise of a future filled with a swollen pregnant belly and then the soft wails of our child greeting the world.

What was not to love about nights spent straddling Peeta in our bed, falling down onto him as his hips thrust upward, driving deeply into me. About making love in the bathtub, covering each other in lackadaisical kisses as wet and messy as the sloshing water slapping the tiles of the floor. About stolen fucks in the bathroom of friends, the noisy sound of flesh smacking against flesh and the stinking smell of sex as he quickly came, quickly tried to make something from nothing.

The start was easy. A year, two years, of making love and fucking, of playing at making a baby.

The game we played next was harder.

It was sitting in crowded waiting rooms, cattle calls of desperation and despair, at the break of dawn, Peeta working on crossword puzzles as I stared blankly at the television on the wall, both of us believing we were better than everyone else because we had all the time and and patience in the world.

It was hushed voices of sympathy from receptionists, the apathy of ultrasound technicians, the faked sympathy of nurses who saw hundreds of us a day.

It was a pill that made me sick. Headaches. Nausea. Hot flashes in the night, my body drenched in a sweat Peeta had not put there. It was needles and vials and tourniquets. The sharp tang of sterile wipes and the metallic smell of blood. Lightheadedness and gauze and bandages and bruised veins that ached for days. It was getting fucked every morning with an ultrasound wand by someone who wouldn’t even look at my face, the stickiness they left behind seeping from me, wetting my thighs, coloring them an unnatural shade of blue.

It was follicle counts and watching, praying, that the black jellybeans on the screen would _grow_ , but not too fast. And not too many. But that they would grow. And then watching them shrink again, fading out of sight.

A poor responder, the doctors said. It happened sometimes. They shrugged off a year of our lives and said they’d try something else, something better.

Then it was more pills, different pills. Off-label pills they doled out after we signed waivers. Pills in the morning and pills at night. Pills that I choked down my throat and shoved up inside of me, sliding them up toward my cervix, pills that burned as they melted and leaked out.

Later came the needles. At first Peeta would rub my back as I grasped enough skin to sink the needle into my abdomen. Night after night needles, my stomach becoming a patchwork quilt of bruises that looked like a flag waving defeat.

He didn’t have to rub my back for long.

Soon I couldn’t feel a thing.

The crosswords Peeta worked on became filled with new letters, over and over, month and month and year after year, a repetitive and tedious game: TTC, OPK, DPO, HCG, FSH, POAS, BFN. BFN. BFN.

There were the countless pregnancy tests, the anxious mornings spent testing out trigger shots, trying not to pee on my hand, waiting and then watching, day after day, as the pregnancy hormones I’d put there against my body’s will worked their way out of my system and the double blue lines grew fainter and fainter until there was just the one.

There were the barbs and insults of Mrs. Mellark, who cruelly discounted us in front of our family, assuming we’d never wanted children, and there were the tears I shed night after night because what if she was right and I was a failure of a woman. There were friends who were afraid to tell us they were expecting—Annie’s eyes that wouldn’t meet mine, Madge’s calls that became less and less frequent until they stopped altogether. There was our heartless wish to once, just once, get a double blue line, even if only for a day—knowing it would be worse to lose that line and what it meant, but wanting anything other than the purgatory we were trapped in.

Soon we went back to making love for the sake of it, fucking only for the sake of it, and when Peeta came inside me, he’d kiss me goodnight and we’d fall asleep in each other’s arms, a family of two. Always.

There were the years we didn’t try at all, never talking about it, never mentioning it because what was there to say about the daughter we could see but never touch? We’d sit across from each other in restaurants, and when I rested my purse on the booth next to me I tried not to think about how it was her place. And in the car I’d catch Peeta’s blue eyes darting to the rearview mirror, surveying our empty backseat. We adopted a dog to fill the backseat, some scruffy-faced mutt we rescued from the SPCA, and we called her Willow.

It helped, for a time.

There was IVF paperwork and adoption paperwork and dusty, forgotten paperwork and then shredded paperwork.

Before we knew it, it was our last shot. We had to make it count.

Tired. I was so tired, so beyond tired, but for Peeta I would do it. I would walk through the fires of hell for him, and in some ways I already had.

Over the years we’d scraped up enough money for one round of IVF, and although I’d long since ceased to hope, we went forward with it anyway.

It was hard, but what came before had been harder. I’d been scorched and burned, and I’d died and been reborn, a fiery mutt that no longer felt pain.

And then she emerged from the shadows somehow, against my body’s better judgment, some divinely perfect thing who found her way inside of me, rooted herself there and stayed and grew and became real.

When they placed our daughter on my chest and I finally heard her cries, I wept along with her. Peeta’s eyes brimmed with tears, and he kissed the top of my head, his lips lingering in my sweat-soaked tresses. He told me fervently, over and over, how much he loved me, every syllable laden with the weight of lives spent loving each other well.

And we stared down at our daughter and knew her face, knew her name. She was the one who had never left us.

She looked exactly like hope.


End file.
